found drama

get oblique

eBay’s experience with Hystrix

by !undefined

Good write up from the eBay team about how they’re using Hystrix to put circuit breakers around problematic methods (read: “remote service calls”). Their experience seems to pretty closely match my own. 1

Also, let’s take a moment to sanity check that closing sentiment:

…but Hystrix has proven to be a sound and mature library for maintaining a resilient environment for our critical applications, providing high availability during any time period.

One thing to remember when working with circuit breakers in the context of a service-oriented architecture (i.e., micro-services) is that there’s the need to differentiate between being “available” and providing the desired level of functioning. Ask yourself: what’s worse: quickly getting back an error that you can handle? or waiting (potentially) a really long time for a successful response? Obviously there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to this question, as it depends on who your consumers are, what your SLAs are, etc. But it’s probably a good idea to get in the habit of preferring fast responses, coping well with errors and failures, and being the good citizen that doesn’t cause cascading failures because you’ve allowed all your request threads to back up and wait on long-running queries that maybe never complete.

  1. Granted: I haven’t been using it as long, and not nearly at their scale.[↩]

search term haiku: September 2015

by Rob Friesel

scared dream locking doors
spam is free from politics
Mumphalumphagus

“Search Term Haiku” is a series wherein I examine this site’s log files and construct one or more haiku poems from search terms and phrases that led visitors to the site. Where possible, I attempt to keep the search phrases intact. However, as these are haiku poems, I do need to follow the rules.

“People still crave that physical proximity…”

by not another Rob?

Katherine Oliver, “Think Global Act Local: It’s More Relevant Than Ever”:

It might seem paradoxical that in a world where media and technology are bringing people together in more ways than ever before, the most innovative cities are looking at ways to facilitate in-person interactions. People still crave that physical proximity and the energy and transfer of ideas that happen in these environments; a nod to the enduring potency of local, human-scaled interactions. There’s a balance to be found between high-tech and lo-fi, analog and digital.

I think about what’s happening in my own town (e.g., the efforts to build a “more walkable downtown”), and this resonates in a big way with me. I think about how I work best at the office, and again: a big resonance.

“the most innovative cities are looking at ways to facilitate in-person interactions”

by not another Rob?

Katherine Oliver, “Think Global Act Local: It’s More Relevant Than Ever”:

It might seem paradoxical that in a world where media and technology are bringing people together in more ways than ever before, the most innovative cities are looking at ways to facilitate in-person interactions. People still crave that physical proximity and the energy and transfer of ideas that happen in these environments; a nod to the enduring potency of local, human-scaled interactions. There’s a balance to be found between high-tech and lo-fi, analog and digital.

I think about what’s happening in my own town (e.g., the efforts to build a “more walkable downtown”), and this resonates in a big way with me. I think about how I work best at the office, and again: a big resonance.

on engineering culture and “manifestos”

by !undefined

RE: How I Structured Engineering Teams at LinkedIn and AdMob for Success

Now I tend to despise the word “manifesto” but the bit about having an “engineering cultural manifesto” was particularly interesting. Where I work we had an all-hands Engineering off-site about exactly this topic a couple months back that really got me thinking about how to translate your successful habits into values, and how to translate those values into a foundation for everything else – on-boarding, technology selection, what conferences you go to, etc. It works well at the macro level, with big division-wide missions statements, but it’s probably even more effective at the micro level – i.e., how scrum team charters can help them develop and maintain a laser focus.

on avoiding X-Requested-With

by !undefined

A worthwhile read, “Solving the OPTIONS Performance Issue With Single Page Apps” talks a bit about the history of XHR, the origin of the X-Requested-With header, and how/why you should prefer an Accept header for content negotiation. In particular, they focus on the performance implications of non-standard/custom headers like X-Requested-With, and how it results in an extra OPTIONS request.